At democratic life meetings, the members of a Party leadership team are expected to criticize one another. In November 2018, inspectors of the Tianjin Party committee reported that at some units, criticism “sees the matter but not the person” and is gexue saoyang, scratching an itch through the boot. The idiom means to miss the point.
In 2023, the Party’s organization newspaper again called for criticism that does not “make light of things or scratch through the boot.”